Introducing “The Lie: Evolution”: An Examination

Some years ago, never mind how many exactly, I had the opportunity to attend an Answers in Genesis conference featuring Ken Ham, their founder and president, and another gentleman whose name I cannot recall but whose presentation was much more targeted toward children.

At the time, mind you, I was a fundamentalist Christian with a passion for creationism. I spent my time debating the merits of “creation science” in a number of online forums, and greatly enjoyed seeing the Ken Ham live and in person. I even dropped $60 or so on a collection of around ten Answers in Genesis publications.

Among those books was The Lie: Evolution: Genesis — The Key to Defending Your Faith, (Seriously, the book basically has two titles for some reason) written by Ken Ham, “a very popular and effective speaker with American church audiences,” according to the blurb.

When I heard Mr. Ham being an “effective speaker,” he described what he considers one of the primary reasons why so many scientists accept evolution despite having the same evidence available to them as the clearly scientifically superior creationists: they wore different “glasses” which colored their interpretation of the evidence available to them.

A person with an unbelieving worldview would have to do whatever they can to interpret evidence in a way which “disproved” creationism, in other words.

At the time I read The Lie: Evolution, the glasses I wore were very much those of a creationist; the Bible was true, the great flood happened, and Earth didn’t exist until between six and ten thousand years ago.

When I abandoned Christianity, it meant abandoning creationism as well, and relearning all that I had known about evolution — and then some.

With what I’ve learned over the past six years, I want to survey The Lie: Evolution, to remind myself of where I’ve been, to probably learn some new stuff along the way, and to share all of it with you.

Luther D. Sunderland, author of Darwin’s Enigma: Ebbing the Tide of Naturalism, says in the foreword to The Lie that Ham “gets to the bottom of the problem” of Christians “finding that even in the United States, the so-called land of the free with a constitution that guarantees the free exercise of religion, their rights are being flagrantly violated?”

Sunderland links the prominence of evolutionary teaching to the “evils of abortion, divorce, homosexuality, pornography, and drugs,” and that this connection is so “subtle that even most of the large religious denominations have been deceived and have failed to recognize it.”

Evolution, Sunderland says, leads us to the realization that “there is no Creator” and that if there is no Creator, there is no nihilism, or as he says, “no purpose in life. … [N]o one watching over us to whom we must someday have to account for our actions. … [T]here are no absolutes; there is a loss of respect for law and absolute principles, and man is set adrift in a purposeless universe.”

The Lie is “must reading for al Christians,” as “Mr. Ham shows that Genesis … is a dependable account of actual events that are supported by solid scientific evidence.”

Okay, so to summarize the foreword of this book, the reason Ken Ham wrote it is because the world sucks, and it’s all because we teach evolution. After all, we all know that BD, there were no murders, no wars, no rapes, no violence of any kind, no homosexuality, no theft, no drugs, no divorce, etc. No, back then, everything was rosy, with everyone fueled by a steadfast devotion to Jesus Christ and a passion for evangelism. Yep, that was the whole world up until modern times.

Further, churches today suck because they too have fallen victim to the lie of evolution. No matter how a church wants to compromise what the Bible says with what scientists say of evolution, that compromise is wrong, and the exact words of the Book of Genesis must be preserved at all costs.

That’s what we have to look forward to in The Lie, which features chapters titled “Christianity is under Attack,” “Creation, Flood, and Coming Fire,” “Death: A Curse and a Blessing,” and the couplet “Evolution Is Religion” and “Creation Is Religion,” a pair of chapters which frame the discussion not as science versus religion but as “the science of one religion versus the science of another religion.”

We have a lot to look forward to in this book, though I will say, I’ll be skipping Ken Ham’s introduction to the book, except to summarize it here: Ken Ham didn’t feel comfortable with churches saying just accept evolution by compromising it with Genesis, so he sought out teaching that confirmed his bias and found a way to turn that into a career. I’m simplifying, obviously, but that’s basically the gist of it. A look at chapter one is coming soon, so stay tuned!